GoldmanSachs666 Message Board

Fraud*According to the Collins English Dictionary 10th Edition fraud can be defined as: "deceit, trickery, sharp practice, or breach of confidence, perpetrated for profit or to gain some unfair or dishonest advantage".[1] In the broadest sense, a fraud is an intentional deception made for personal gain or to damage another individual; the related adjective is fraudulent. The specific legal definition varies by legal jurisdiction. Fraud is a crime, and also a civil law violation. Defrauding people or entities of money or valuables is a common purpose of fraud, but there have also been fraudulent "discoveries", e.g. in science, to gain prestige rather than immediate monetary gain*As defined in Wikipedia

Just for yuks, let's fill Binswanger in on some of the ways Goldman
has made its money over the years.

This is just the stuff they've been
caught for, by the way.

• Way back in 1999, several eras of corruption ago, Goldman serially
engaged in manipulation of the IPO markets, including illegal tactics
like "spinning" and "laddering," where insiders and top bank clients
would be allowed to buy shares in new companies at severely discounted
prices, sometimes in return for investment banking business or for
promises that those insiders would jump back into the bidding later to
jack up the price artificially. In a famous case involving eToys,
Goldman paid a $7.5 million settlement for allowing insiders to buy
shares at $20, far below the $75 shares the company traded on opening
day. The secret discounts might have cost the company hundreds of
millions of dollars. The firm went bankrupt in short order, by the way.

• In the infamous "Abacus" case,
Goldman teamed up with a hedge-fund billionaire named John Paulson to
create a born-to-lose portfolio of mortgage derviatives, which were then
marketed by Goldman to a pair of sucker European banks, IKB and
ABN-Amro. When the instruments crashed, Paulson made bank on bets he
made against his own loser portfolio. Goldman's peculiar role was in
"renting the platform," i.e. allowing IKB and ABN-Amro to think that
neutral Goldman, not a hedge funder like Paulson massively betting
against the product, had created the portfolio. Goldman only made $15
million in the deal that ended up causing over a billion in losses,
meaning this wasn't even just about money – they were just trying to
curry favor with a hedge fund client out to screw a bunch of Euros.
They were fined $550 million.

• In the even more absurd Hudson deal,
Goldman unloaded a billion-plus sized chunk of toxic mortgage-backed
crap on Morgan Stanley during a time when Lloyd "Mother Teresa"
Blankfein was telling his minions to unload as much of the firm's 'cats
and dogs' as possible, ie. its soon-to-explode subprime holdings. In its
marketing materials, Goldman represented to Morgan Stanley that its
interests were aligned with Morgan, because Goldman owned a $6 million
slice of the Hudson deal. It didn't disclose that it had a $2 billion bet against it. Morgan Stanley, which was subsequently bailed out by taxpayers like Harry Binswanger, lost $960 million.

• Goldman paid a fine to the SEC in 2010
after it was caught breaking rules governing short-selling on at least
385 occasions – it is currently embroiled in numerous lawsuits that
similarly allege that Goldman has engaged in widespread "naked" short
selling, a kind of stock counterfeiting that artificially depresses the
prices of companies by flooding the market with phantom shares.

• Earlier this year, Goldman and Chase agreed to pay a combined $557 million
to settle government claims that the banks and/or their mortgage
servicing arms engaged in wholesale abuses in the real estate markets,
including (but not limited to) robosigning, the practice of
mass-producing fictitious, perjured affidavits for the courts for the
purposes of foreclosing on homeowners.

• In what one former SEC official described to me as "an open-and-shut case of anticompetitive behavior," Goldman took a $3 million payment from J.P. Morgan Chase
to bow out of the bidding for a toxic interest rate swap deal Chase
wanted to stick to the citizens of Jefferson County, Alabama. Goldman
got the payment, a Chase banker joked, "for taking no risk." Chase ended
up funneling money to the County Commissioner, who signed off on a
deadly deal that put the citizens of the Birmingham, Alabama area into
billions of debt (and ultimately bankruptcy), in what is still
considered the largest regional financial disaster in American history.

• In 2009, a Goldman programmer named Sergey Aleynikov
left his office in possession of a code that contained Goldman's
high-frequency trading algorithms. Goldman promptly called the FBI –
which up until that point had done exactly zero to prevent crime on Wall
Street – to help Mother Teresa's bank recapture its valuable trading
code. In court, a federal prosecutor admitted that the code Aleynikov
had in his possession could, "in the wrong hands," be used to manipulate
markets. Aleynikov just pulled an eight-year sentence. Goldman,
incidentally, has gone entire quarters without posting a single day of
trading loss – in Q1 2010, the bank made at least $25 million every single day,
somehow never once betting wrong in 63 trading days. Imagine that! What
foresight! What skill! One can see how Mr. Binswanger could believe
that the bank's CEO should be exempt from income taxes.
I could go on – Goldman has been wrapped up in virtually every kind
of scandal known to investment banking (and even more that they
invented) and was recently at the center of a mysterious and near-catastrophic computer-trading disaster that could have caused massive social damage (more on that in a column coming soon).

GS666 #4 on TopSites List

Famous Quotes

The men the American people admire most extravagantly are the greatest liars; the men they detest most violently are those who try to tell them the truth. … H.L. Mencken

An age is called Dark not because the light fails to shine, but because people refuse to see it…James Albert Michener, novelist (1907-1997)

It is impossible to calculate the moral mischief, if I may so express it, that mental lying has produced in society. When a man has so far corrupted and prostituted the chastity of his mind as to subscribe his professional belief to things he does not believe he has prepared himself for the commission of every other crime. … Thomas Paine 1737-1809, Anglo-American Political Theorist, Writer

Laws just or unjust may govern mens actions. Tyrannies may restrain or regulate their words. The machinery of propaganda may pack their minds with falsehood and deny them truth for many generations of time. But the soul of man thus held in trance or frozen in a long night can be awakened by a spark coming from God knows where and in a moment the whole structure of lies and oppression is on trial for its life.: Sir Winston ChurchillWhen governments fear the people, there is liberty. When the people fear the government, there is tyranny. - Thomas Jefferson

When cheaters prosper, we end up with the worst possible system and to call it a free market system is an obscenity. -William BlackWhen the people fear their government, there is tyranny; when the government fears the people, there is liberty." - Thomas JeffersonI believe that banking institutions are more dangerous to our liberties than standing armies. If the American people ever allow private banks to control the issue of their currency, first by inflation, then by deflation, the banks and corporations that will grow up around the banks will deprive the people of all property - until their children wake-up homeless on the continent their fathers conquered. Thomas Jefferson - 1802

Don't be afraid to see what you see.

..................................... Ronald Reagan

When the people and the government fear Banksters like Goldman Sachs and JP Morgan, there is economic dictatorship that will destroy the very fabric of our existence as a civilized society.Mike Morgan

Let me control the money of a nation and I care not who makes its laws.Meyer Amsheil Rothschild

Together We Can Make A Difference!Larry Rubinoff*************Send your "Famous Quotes" to info@goldmansachs666.com